Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will ship with PHP 7.4

PHP 7.4 was officially released at the end of November last year and brought some very useful new features. For this reason, Ubuntu developers are very happy with PHP 7.4 and intend to make it available in the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Because this version not only performs well but more importantly, compared to providing PHP 7.3, PHP 7.4 can get an additional year of technical support from the upstream PHP development team.

PHP 7.4 brings a lot of interesting new features, such as FFI that can be used to access C structures/functions/variables in native PHP code, Opcache preloading, simplified anonymous functions, and more performance improvements, etc… If PHP 7.4 can be successfully provided in Ubuntu 20.04, it will also be good news for developers.

According to the Ubuntu development mailing list, Canonical’s Bryce Harrington stated that they plan to transition the PHP 7.4 project to the Ubuntu 20.04 “Focal” archive around the next week or so.